--[and who also] is a Jewish, lesbian poet who writes sensually and candidly about her life--our life--as it happens.

Robin Becker's third book of poems is in mny ways continuous with her second, Giacometti's Dog, also published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her subjects are often the same: childhood in Philadelphia, travel within the US (particularly to the desert Southwest) and abroad, her Jewish heritage, family relations, grief for her father and for her younger sister's suicide, and love between women. She has a gift for listing and a gift for sensual description (the two often ombine). In both All-American Girl and Giacometti's Dog, Becker's lyric poems are also narratives: they often tell engaging stories even as they express and illuminate emotion. Like most poets, Becker tends to write her love poems at the start or end of love affairs (she seems to have been blessed with many!), but she does so in ways which convey the rich complexity of whole experiences. Her sense of irony is often humorous, often poignant, and rarely cutting.

All-American Girl, is a more broadly sensual and intimate collection than Giacomietti's Dog. As in the earlier book, Becker often reimagines dark times and painful experiences, but in the new poems a robust energy and disarming candor tend to displace a former delicacy and triste-ness. In the earlier collection only a few poems are explicitly about lesbian experience and fewer still are explicitly sexual. In these lovely lines from "Philadelphia, 1955," for example, the young Robin Becker:

in a nightgown
closes the door and walks barefoot
on the black grass. Stars have grouped
like families into their fixed relations.
She welcomes the grat indifference
of the street and recites the names

of everyone asleep in the brick row houses.